Before we get into what’s happening now, it’s worth remembering that on April 21 everything changes. That’s the date the new Google Algorithm drops and it’s likely to really shake things up. By rewarding sites that are mobile friendly with a better ranking, it will dramatically change the results shown for many searches. Now the whole point of these changes is to improve the user experience and Google doesn’t pre announce much of the details. So the full effect – including issues such as how apps influence results – will only become apparent on the day.

It may be worth having your creative technologists shelve their Watch apps and Virtual Reality experiments for the moment, to look at something that will have a big effect on your business in the very near future.

FacebookIt has felt like a Facebook week this week. Last Friday we saw an excellent event showcasing Atlas and it was clear this is a major shift for the whole industry. Essentially Atlas will let you take all the smart targeting and measurement you are doing within Facebook (to work out who the really important people for your business) and amplify it by finding the same people across the internet.By doing this they solve the crucial issues of targeting, measuring reach and optimising frequency. Across devices. And highlight the fact that cookie based systems have inherent flaws on desktop as well as mobile.

Then at London Advertising Week I spoke on one of their panels, looking at what is holding mobile back. It won’t surprise anyone that we all agreed on measurement and creativity as key issues.

In his keynote Zuck talked about their family of apps and the fact they built Messenger rather than bought it is a source of some pride. Being able to add emojis Gifs and videos to your chats on Messenger strengthens them against the new generation of Messenger apps. And the idea that businesses can use it to send receipts etc is really interesting. AsBen Evans tweetsFacebook isn’t taking on WeChat. It’s taking on the iOS/Android notification panel

It is likely that news will follow the same trajectory as clever brands who moved from creating destination websites to distributing their content around the web – going to where the people are rather than hoping they can be dragged to the destination. For news this has some logic despite the fact they once were true destinations. But just as TV stations gravitate to the platforms with eyeballs – Sky or cable etc – so too will news brands move to platforms like Facebook and SnapChat Discover.

Since dividing into two apps Foursquare and Swarm seem to have lost their way. Swarm doesn’t offer the same ‘buzz’ for checking in and Foursquare seems to throw out random notifications telling me what the glaring obvious. At Advertising Week it helpfully tells me that the coffee is good at Bafta.

Everyone seems to be on meerkat now and we have seen some good stuff and lots and lots of average stuff. We even tried to live stream Nile Rodgers and Chic from the Roundhouse last Friday but the connection wasn’t quite good enough.

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have over 3500 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.

Ever since they poached David Marcus from Paypal we have known that Facebook were going to get into money and they have now launched their payment service for Messenger. It’s very simple – once you have added a debit card to your account – and it’s free. (Credit cards aren’t accepted right now because of the fraud risk and the fees) Once it’s all working we can expect it to roll out to the WhatsApp user base too.

With Forrester estimating mobile payments will triple to $142bn by 2019, this puts Facebook in the money game – but we think the real prize is people paying for things rather than paying their friends. Which is why the interesting news from Facebook this week is their purchase of shopping curation site The Find.

Whilst big brands are switching spend to Facebook it’s the smaller advertisers who arguably can have the most impact – the 2 million advertisers. Demonstrating how well the new Products ads work by enabling payments would solve the attribution issue once and for all.

Halifax Bank is trying a wearable that reads your heartbeat to unlock your account but it seems rather complicated and one suspects a double espresso or running up the stairs might cause a problem. This sounds more like a PR stunt.

The Disney wristband sounds like a PR stunt too, but they do seem to have a really exciting service – because it solves real problems. This longish piece is worth reading as it also gets into how proximity can be helpful. If you are thinking about beacons – and who isn’t ? – there is a lot to learn here.

And the new VC backed bus service in San Francisco is a good use case for Bluetooth / proximity. As well as showing how tech (and tech focused investment) is starting to impact every aspect of life. One other interesting example is Subway rewarding customers who use their instore wifi. Why – because the data is so valuable – knowing how often someone visits your stores can drive your CRM and – now – your programmatic and retargeting. The ability to connect your physical world with the digital world enables great experiences for customers

Of course the original Pangea continent eventually split and formed the various continents we are familiar with today. Can this alliance last? The first thing the buyers will do is try and see which approach gets the best value – buy everything from Pangea or divide and conquer and deal direct.

We have argued before that the industry obsessions with metrics – like clicks and views – that are poor surrogates for what really counts; impact on sales.

P&G know a little about marketing and they have called for more consistency around advertising and the sales outcome. This interview with Global Brand Office is good insight into how smart brands are approaching digital; he sees further growth from the current 35% share for digital.

A new study from the Mobile Marketing Association provides some real metrics – they replicated the studies the IAB did for digital 10 years ago to measure the impact of mobile in multi channel campaigns for Coke, Walmart, Mastercard and others. All the studies showed a very positive impact for mobile – on footfall in stores, purchase intent and actual sales. They argue that mobile merits a double digit share of total spend – not just of the digital budget,

Apps for news

This is an interesting look at how the news industry uses apps – and argues that most publishers would be better to concentrate on mobile web. It also tackles the myth about app use dominating mobile use – pointing out that a huge proportion of the time allocated to the Facebook app is actually spent on web pages delivered within Facebook.

There is no right or wrong answer – as ever the right strategy is dictated by the problem you are solving – for your business and for your customer.

Meerkat & Periscope

There is no doubt that the app that won SXSW this year was Meerkat. It is everywhere and everyone is streaming – although lots of them are not that interesting. We did see one example that demonstrates just how disruptive it will be. Social media guru Gary Veynerchuck gave a great keynote at this weeks Guardian Changing Media Summit – and he streamed it on Meerkat. Not a perfect experience but it worked really well and the 250+ people watching didn’t pay the £999 delegate fee.

If you could do with some smart thinking or doing around any of the subjects we cover then do get in touch

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have over 3500 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.

Almost exactly 10 years after the launch of YouTube we have probably seen the next step in the evolution of video ; live ephemeral video from Meerkat

In the 10 days since I signed up after seeing it on Product Hunt, the vast majority of my notifications have been from Meerkat – both as many of the people I follow on Twitter sign up and others go ‘live now’. Much of the content is peoples first attempts and not that interesting, but we are starting to see some interesting use cases. For example smart VC @cape has been using it to talk with some of their start ups. There were a couple of people streaming the Watch launch and news channel CNBC have used it for some news coverage

Whichever service wins out, the genie is out of the bottle. Take just one obvious use case – football. The Premier league have been trying to get Vines of goals taken down but I see Leeds goals on Facebook Twitter etc all the time; imagine someone filming the whole game on Meerkat. Or Periscope.

The user experience isn’t currently great but this is a new format and it is going to disrupt a lot of things.

The other big story this week was the Apple Watch. But we actually didn’t learn very much we didn’t know before. No information on the tech, vague hints about battery life and we don’t even know the dimensions – it looks like quite a deep piece of equipment.

Our view is that the launch will do pretty well as there are plenty of people who love Apple and will want to be seen with the device asap. We will only really know about the long term success when these people start showing their watches off to their friends. Word of mouth from passionate iPhone users drove that success. Will the same thing work for the watch? For that to happen the battery life needs to be good and the apps need to convince. Time will tell.

They still make laptops?

The surprise at the event was the launch of the new Macbook which got quite mixed reviews, with many thinking the current Air and Pro are better. With great timing Google launched their new Chromebooks – which are getting great reviews.

We have long argued that – at some point – Apple gets the Levis 501 problem. Yes they are great jeans but when everyone else has them, it’s time to find an alternative. Look around any artisan coffee shop in London, Lisbon, LA or Leeds and everyone has a Macbook. How long before having a Chromebook or the Experia Z4 is the cool choice? And what does that do to the Apple ecology?

If you are in London you can play with the new Chromebooks (and the very impressive Nexus 6) at Googles first ever retail store. It’s not quite the Brand Cathedral that Apple typically does – being a part of the Currys store on Tottneham Court Road –but it is worth a visit.

There is a likely new dimension though – text to voice. If I get an alert on my watch about a new email, why do I have to try and read it on my watch or get out my phone? Why can’t it be read to me – hopefully, for everyone elses sake - through my Bluetooth head set?

If you could do with some smart thinking or doing around any of the subjects we cover then do get in touch

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have over 3500 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.

But we also think it points out a major issue for marketing – Missing Metrics.

In many of our conversations with brands the substance of digital metrics is questioned. Clicks, visits and impressions – polluted by worries over viewability and bots – aren’t seen as valid. Especially at board level, where they obsess over customers, revenues and profits.

Clearly reliable attribution is the holy grail but one missing metric is around brand effect – the data points that have driven traditional marketing for generations. Shouldn’t we adopt that in mobile? It is possible to pretest mobile creative for brand metrics and to optimize programmatic around brand metrics. Why aren’t we doing this more?

The second Missing Metric is around how advertising can and does annoy people. See that same ad again and again? Video ads that autoplay with the sound up? Pops ups and interstials – where the X to close is so small it’s almost impossible not to end up clicking through? And the relentless retargeting, stalking you around the web?

If brands could measure just how many people were annoyed by these clumsy tactics, would they still do them? There is a macro metric around annoying people – the rise in adblocking. Perhaps we should all just imagine there is such a micro metric too and recognize that pissing people off probably isn’t a good idea.

The best answer to adblocking is to make advertising better. As we no longer have to treat people as strangers, we can now use data to really understand which ads are relevant to people. And therefore less likely to annoy. And more likely to be effective.

Traditional & Digital

On a similar tip we see that smart brands know that a mix of old and new media makes sense. Which is why we favour aligning around brand metrics. Whilst the agency world isn’t that well organized to deliver this type of support, these clients are able to orchestrate different people to deliver the best of both worlds.

It’s worth remembering that GAFA are pretty big on traditional media too. Facebook have a UK ad campaign live at the moment – developed inhouse. And Google spent £45m (almost as much as Ford) in 2013 – making it the UKs 31st biggest advertiser and Amazon outspent Vauxhall coming in at number 40.

They know – like we do – that what’s important is marketing that’s right for the digital age, rather than digital marketing.

Murdoch has a subscription model but everyone else relies on ad revenue. And the industry seems to have decided that a reader holding their smartphone is worth considerably less than a reader with newsprint on their fingers.

So we can imagine the economics here, as the cpm for mobile is likely to be a fraction of that for print. But conversions are so much lower on mobile, I hear you cry. No-one knows much about the conversions on print but brands know a full page in a tabloid gets the attention of the reader.

If we can’t find a way to better capture the value of the mobile users attention, the future for these newspapers doesn’t look that healthy.

The other part of the news landscape seems to be doing better. Vice and Buzzfeed are setting the agenda and Upworthy are seen as the fastest growing media economy of all time. Now you could debate whether you should lump all these brands in the same news bucket, but many do – and the old school print legacy people are increasingly adopting behaviours from these newcomers.

But ultimately it comes down to monetization and whether the only option for the old players is to learn the new tricks of native and viral video.

We still think that good old fashioned advertising can work on mobile and the news sites can prosper through delivering the attention of their readers through compelling creative. That’s why we have partnered with ResponsiveAds to launch their platform in Europe – rich, engaging messaging that works across devices and reduces the time and cost of production. If you want to make your advertising work harder get in touch

He talks for the first time about Facebook’ ambition to have publishers upload their content directly onto Facebook (probably similar in concept if not in execution to Snapchats Discover?). But he admits publishers are proving reticent. No surprise there then. He also talks about their focus on video. Again, well worth watching.

As is this interview with Sundar Pichai of Google – Larry Pages go to guy for product. With a lot of responsibility (essentially everything other than YouTube and adsales) he covers a lot of topics. The key insights are the likely dismantling of Google+ – with popular elements like Hangouts and Photos standing more alone – and their plans for monetizing Play store with search ads.

And he carefully answers a question about the Google search in ioS – saying it’s a long term deal and ..

I think how search manifests in iOS will work out just fine. We have a long term search partnership and are working together with them, and we’ll have to see.

70k people schlepped to Barcelona this week for the Mobile World Congress. We resisted the temptation and just missed a few good parties and a lot of walking.

As well as lots of new devices – which all look just the same – from everyone apart than Apple, the ad agencies and vendors were the main attraction with lots of meeting rooms booked. And the odd party.

And Mark Zuckerberg gave a talk on Internet.org – the drive to get more people from emerging markets online. People from MNOs joined him and he pushed them to provide the free data to hook people into – eventually – paying for it.

If you could do with some smart thinking or doing around any of the subjects we cover then do get in touch

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have over 3500 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.

Mobile advertisingThe business model of this new mobile world is clearly advertising. Stratchery make an interesting comparison between TV and Snapchat – big audiences with a good level of engagement but little or no targeting. And he makes the point that brands want big audiences, especially of young people. And that Snapchat have learned from Facebook that size matters so they are seen as;

Advertising has also talked to strangers – because it had no alternative.

So ads have to be ‘bland’ enough to appeal to everyone. And bland doesn’t get noticed.

But in our brave new data driven world advertising to strangers is an anathema. We can know lots about the people we’re talking to, so we can and must tailor the message to be relevant.

It then has a better than 1 in 10 chance of being noticed.

So the economics of creative change – and when you blend in technology, we can industrialise creative production – and make it more effective.

SME s – The neglected ad opportunity

When we talk about advertising we all tend to focus on big brands spending large amounts through their agencies. But the hidden part of the advertising iceberg is the small advertisers who have a local footprint. Many of these SMEs have already weaned themselves off traditional media – look at how thin local press, trade press and directories tend to be these days.

A large element of Google growth has been these small advertisers using search as a wonderfully efficient way to reach customers.

But Facebook is making big inroads into this market – and seem to be taking revenue from Google. A friend tweeted about this;

Finally…. I spent last Friday at the Techstars Demo Day. Having been a mentor to the really smart people at Big Data for Humans I had met all the teams at the start of the process. But I was astonished at how the 12 weeks had transformed some of them and the day was a succession of compelling pitches from really promising start ups. This list of some bigger, more established, start ups, reminds us how this start up energy translates into our everyday life.

Currently there are two fairly distinct centres of gravity in mobile money. One is here in the west where incumbents are looking to use mobile to reduce costs. The other is in emerging markets where people see the potential to transform peoples live through better access to financial tools.

These two will collide before too long – with incumbents disrupted by allowing new players to offer better tools and products.

MPesa as now widely accepted as a huge success story – inspiring services like PingIT in the UK. Now Bill Gates is talking about the potential to transform more lives;

Samsung have stepped into this space with the purchase of LoopPay – where retailers don’t need to change their existing POS systems so potentially this will work in more places than Pay. Both Apple and Samsung see that having your mobile wallet on your smartphone is a potential Anchor – keeping you buying the same make of device.

We are now just weeks away from the Apple watch going on sale and the hype is building. A very long (but fascinating) article on Jonathan Ives manages to capture the spirit of Apples designers and gets over their obsession for delighting users. And it makes you really want the watch.

Lots of brands we talk with are thinking about what to do with Watch. It’s clear that the potential for notifications is huge – but making them useful – even valuable – rather than annoying, is the challenge. Some great thinking in this piece, that digs into the Apple guidance for Interface. There is a big prize here to make the killer app for the Watch and it may well be someone unexpected who does break through.

An event we spoke at last year coined the notion that location is the cookie of mobile. At it’s most simple we know people that use the broad location of the user to thwart ad fraud. And at the bespoke end, clever people are identifying real football fans by their presence at the Emirates, Elland Road and even Old Trafford at certain times. Using location history or in real time can be a significant aid to targeting.

Fix friend Russell Buckley digs deeper in this piece on hyper local. And banks are starting to use location to reduce fraud - and remove a major irritation to regular travellers. Rather than declining a transaction because it’s in a foreign country, the banks will now use location data from the phone to see if that is also in the same country. We pitched this concept to a number of banks 5 years ago, with a business case around the fact a traveller will choose to use a card where the change of a decline is reduced. I think we were a little too early.

The potential for connecting mobile with the real world is enormous - this report speculates it could influence $40bn in US retail sales next year. The friction is the tech back up needed to scale beacons in a robust way. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in this space. One of the best startups in this space seem to have cracked this and their partnership with one of the worlds biggest retailers should be a great case study - when they can go public with it.

We are working to solve this and we’re looking for brands that want to collaborate with us. We are exploring how we unlock the value of creative optimised against the data signals that programmatic throws off. Keep in touch with this project by following @Route55

Finally …. At Chinese New Year it’s a tradition to give friends and family a red envelope containing cash. As you might expect this behaviour has migrated to mobile and last year around 20 million envelopes were sent on WeChat.

This year over 1 billion envelopes were sent. This huge growth was partly driven by a Chinese TV show which invited users to shake their WeChat app at certain points in the show, to have a chance to win a share of $80million donated by corporate sponsors. This show generated 11 billion shakes – at one point over 800million per minute.

The sheer scale of China is amazing but the thing for Fix readers to think about is that the power of combining TV and mobile has yet to be unlocked in the west. Imagine if ITV and Shazam combined to do this sort of thing?. Or the BBC and Facebook? Or what if a brand comes up with a truly compelling reason to interact with their TV commercial.

If you could do with some smart thinking or doing around any of the subjects we cover then do get in touch

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have over 3400 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.

Dial up modems gave us a text based internet – not that different to the dial up walled gardens of AOL and Prodigy that preceded it. Then Broadband gave us an Internet with pictures – you no longer groaned when a page had a photo on it and things like Flickr took off. Now with 4G and mobile we are clearly in the Video era.

As these eras roll out, nothing disappears – but people gravitate to the richer experiences and decades of Hollywood and TV show us that people like watching video. But whilst something that looks a lot like TV is more appealing to many marketers than the previous internet era ever was, we should recognise that quite a lot has changed.

We think that focusing on these celebs are sort of missing the point. The potential of online video is about more than here today and probably gone tomorrow teenagers. There is some real talent here, but are endorsements from these people really worth what they cost?

We think the focus should be understanding the tropes of these media and how to get the most out of each new channel. The talent can clearly help here but brands should be thinking through how they can create content for Vine, Snapchat and Facebook that delivers their message.

Talk to anyone in digital marketing and you soon get to talking about attribution. Knowing what works is still the holy grail in digital – despite billions being spent on traditional marketing with relatively little accountability.

Google has got rich on last click attribution as most revenue goes to the provider of the last click – whether that be search or affiliates. But everyone knows its a more complicated, nuanced story and that brand activity has an effect. As does many aspects of digital beyond the source of that list click before the purchase or other action. Fold in a multi device world and it just gets worse.

One reason that mobile ads have taken so long to scale is that people are still reluctant to complete a form or entering a credit card on mobile – so whilst mobile marketing probably did have an effect, they go to a tablet or desktop to complete the transaction and the crude attribution models we have reward that click. Knowing which half of marketing is wasted continues to be a problem.

The nearest thing we have to an answer is first part data. Google and Facebook and others with continually logged in users can – in theory – know exactly what marketing messages their users have seen within their empire. The bigger that empire, the more useful that first party data. As long as your users T&Cs let you use it for that purpose.

Now if you are the worlds largest agency group – who see Google and Facebook as frenemies – this is really annoying. The people with the best idea of what works are the vendors and the WPP spend with GAFA grows significantly every year.

With significant stakes in these two complimentary businesses – and the talent in WPP – they must hope to cook up a way to better understand the interplay between TV, digital and purchases. State of the art attribution. If they do crack this they have the chance to take back the ringmaster position, deciding where brands should spend their money. Otherwise GAFA and programmatic will continue to erode their influence and position.

We were reminded of this analysis suggesting Facebook is charging more for ads. We think this is down to the increasing share of ads that are video – but it also supports our view that the healthy growth of mobile advertising hides a polarized market. Those with relatively rare first part data are making more and more money whilst the ad networks with infinite supply of raw undifferentiated inventory are flatlining.

If you could do with some smart thinking or doing around any of the subjects we cover then do get in touch

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have over 3400 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.

We can expect lots of marketing to try and grow this user base and build out those households taking the 4 services from one supplier. Broadband is the key as – increasingly – TV can be delivered that way – in whatever format that comes as – and a high proportion of mobile traffic is delivered over the home Wi-Fi rather than the network.The same OFCOM report shows how TV habits are changing – in most age groups people claim around a quarter of their viewing is recorded or on demand. (Barb data suggests a slightly lower figure for recorded viewing)

In the US this week Murdochs’ Fox network reported poorer than expected figures which were claimed to be the result of a decline in broadcast TV viewing. Clearly the content is still valued but the means of distribution are in flux.Look at the 16-24 group – only half of their viewing is live. (Remember this next time you are told that Facebook urban myth; that it’s over because young people are leaving it)

The attraction of on-demand, streaming, box sets and social video are proving a huge attraction to young people. (Remember too that cult TV show Breaking Bad was never seen on UK TV other than one early season on C5)

We can’t assume that at some point in their late 20s they are all going to start liking Ant & Dec and switching back to ITV – marketing needs to embrace the Chromecast generation.

Just like Google Search is the front door to the internet on the PC and with Android the front door to mobile for many, we think Chromecast could give Google the keys to the front door of newTV.

In just 18 months Chromecast has sold over 10 million units and has done a billion cast sessions. More and more content owners – of all types – are partnering. BT have dropped their broadcast channels for BT Sport and give a Chromecast to their customers instead.

So both Google and the Quad Play providers are new actors in newTV and they all put mobile front and centre. With a mobile as the best identifier of an individual, there are clear implications for better ad targeting. Worth watching.

Some of the smartest publishers are moving to responsive design so they can better manage their content and give their readers the best experience, whatever device they are using. Given how the plethora of mobile screensizes, let alone tablets and desktops, it simply isn’t feasible to take any other approach.

The challenge now switches to advertising – how do best use this palette for a brand? Creating rich experiences that use all the real estate on a desktop view makes good sense. But ensuring that a smartphone user still gets a rich experience is vital too.To help accelerate this, we are working with ResponsiveAds to bring their highly innovative self serve platform to Europe. Used by a wide variety of US publishers the team has delivered great campaigns that incorporate video, social feeds etc. Because you build one ad rather than multiple ones the process is quicker and cheaper – and you don’t have to compromise the idea. We can offer professional services to help develop the creative and or templates too. We are already talking to a couple of publishers and a brand or two, but if you would like to know more get in touch.

Snapchat has more scripted content. This time with Hollywood royalty. I am speaking at the London Book Fair Digital Minds conference about this sort of thing in a few weeks. There is huge potential to rethink traditional content for new platforms. Can audiobook be a podcast? Can we take the Radio4 book at bedtime format and make that work on Facebook? A new chapter every day? How could brands get involved? Do we reinvent soap operas? Serial was just the start.

In the week that JayZ gets into the streaming business some seemingly well informed speculation about Beats. As we have said before, curation is key to streaming, so having artists involved makes lots of sense. Not least because lots of people in the music industry just don’t believe that streaming is ever going to make them any money. Dre and JayZ are likely to be more credible in that debate than Daniel Ek.

If you could do with some smart thinking or doing around any of the subjects we cover then do get in touch

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have 3400 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.

Another key stat from the Facebook investors deck- is that the Advertising ARPU is $8.26 – up 55% on the same quarter last year – whilst in Europe it is just $3.22 – up 36% on 2013. So despite fantastic growth, there is still more potential – supporting what we hear from brands.

And the other end of their mission is to bring people in emerging markets onto Facebook which is helped by a new app for emerging markets. Designed to work on low end Android devices this ‘lite’ app is being launched in 8 markets across Africa and Asia.

Google

The Google results were OK - not quite good enough to beat estimates but healthy rises in revenue and income was 40% higher than the same period last year. Although this was helped by the proceeds of selling Motorola.

With the inexorable rise of programmatic there is some debate over how agencies are approaching the space. This anonymous account of the UK scene is interesting but should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.

If you could do with some smart thinking or doing around any of the subjects we cover then do get in touch

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have over 3300 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.

This slightly overexcited piece looks at the background, newish players like Sling and how the US are trying to restrict the power of then cable companies.

And in Europe the push towards quad play has put O2 in play – with Sky a likely suitor although a merger with 3 is possible. now underway Much of our thinking around Quad play remains valid and we continue to believe that the media rights for the Premiership will show us what the new landscape looks like.

The money involved in EDM is huge, but whether Simon Cowell can add anything remains to be seen. And how a digital platform handles this type of content will be interesting.

Video

Whilst the Mary Meeker money chart (showing money has yet to follow audience onto mobile) remains burnt onto the retina of many, we are seeing TV spend migrate to digital. As the Omnicom quote from late last year showed, the rise of online video is being driven by a recognition that moving some money from TV to digital makes the campaign more efficient.

This is an area we are fascinated by and we would love to find some brands to partner with to explore this huge opportunity. If you are interested, get in touch.

Retail

Our coverage of retail changing sparked lots of conversations, with the general point being that people have changed their behavior whilst shopping and retailers and brands have yet to work out how to respond.

One of our mantras is that brands need to find a way to solve a customers problem whilst solving their own business problem. Most marketing failures are when something achieves just one side of this equation. Starbucks are another brand we often focus in in workshops as they are really really good at this.

Flurry point out that the end of the PC is coming, but spend any time in a Starbucks or other coffee shop and you can see that the laptop is still the device of choice for some people for some tasks at least some of the time. The same applies in most offices, so smart brands build experiences that work across devices – so WhatsApp now have a desktop product. And we love the fact they use a QR code to connect your mobile to the desktop service.

Talking of Twitter we met a smart analyst who is convinced Twitter is doomed until they change leadership and direction. We tend to disagree but accept that the product needs to evolve to make it easier to use for civilians. Our solution would be around Twitter lists and this post shows how someone uses them very effectively.

We believe that getting really good at using the emerging platforms is a vital skill for brands as there can be real competitive advantage here. Here are 10 good examples of campaigns on WeChat. What can we learn here?

Finally – we are out and about again and next week I am speaking at a fascinating event about Programmatic and Branding organized by the smart people at Infectious. My bit is around the huge opportunity for creative that works with programmatic – drawing upon all that data to make more relevant and more effective ads. If you work at a brand and are interested in this area we may be able to squeeze you in – let me know.

If you could do with some smart thinking or doing around any of the subjects we cover then do get in touch

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We have 3400 subscribers across tech firms like Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo etc as well as many Brands and Agencies. We’re happy for you to forward this mail to anyone you think might be interested. If they do find it useful they can sign up for email here.